The Jihad of Meaning: Islam’s Struggle with Islamic Extremism

Stories about radical Islamists fill the news. Focusing on their violence and their claims of recovering the “true” Islam misses a larger point: symptoms of a bigger jihad (struggle) within Islam over ijtihad (the qualified religious reasoning of a legal problem or development). Historically, how have Muslims dealt with internal differences over external challenges? Prof. Michael Chamberlain (UW History); Prof. Asifa Quraishi-Landes (UW Law); Imam Hamza Maqbul, Muslim Assoc. of Greater Rockford